Analog SFF, May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  Ultimately, all of this brings us back to Asimov, chaos theory, and the Foundation series.

  From a theoretical perspective, many of us, like Toynbee, Bretz's critics, and Asimov's psychohistorians, are inherently drawn toward gradualism. After all, it offers the promise that if we can but tease out the rules by which the world works, past, present, and future events are well ordered, predictable, and under control.

  On the other hand, predictability makes for poor stories. As readers, we are biased toward Bretz's flood, the Mule, Nur's earthquake storm: These have more the flavor we're looking for.

  But it may be that Bradbury and chaos theory have it better: The laws governing the world may be well ordered, but maybe they are so incredibly sensitive to small changes that predictability is, to all intents and purposes, impossible. Zeilinga de Boer's vibrating string is a great model for alternate history. If he's right, the story options are virtually unlimited.

  Scientifically, I like grand unifying theories like gradualism. In fiction? Give me a little bit of vibrating-string chaos, any day.

  Copyright © 2009 Richard A. Lovett

  * * * *

  1 Comments from Soennichsen come from personal interviews. His book, Bretz's Flood, was in press when this article was written and should be available now, from Sasquatch Books.

  2 The phrase appears in Basin and Range, perhaps the most eloquent book ever written about geology. It's not clear, though, whether McPhee was the first one to use it.

  3 See Richard A. Lovett, “Living at Extremes: Antarctic Lakes Yield Lessons for Mars, Europa, and Beyond,” Analog, February 2002.

  4 Fans of the Atlantis myth, on the other hand, were having a field day. Do a web search for “Atlantis,” “Crete,” “Minoans,” and any other key word from later in this article, and you'll get an enormous range of hits.

  5 A. J. Toynbee, Study of History, Vol. 4, as quoted by Nur, infra.

  6 Elizabeth French, “Evidence for an Earthquake in Mycenae,” in Archaeseismology, 51-54, S. Stiros and R. E. Jones, Eds., 1996, as quoted by Nur, infra.

  7 Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders, Volcanoes in Human History, 2002.

  8 The correlation among these dates isn't perfect. Some studies, Zeilinga de Boer notes, show cooling from 1630 to 1620 B.C.E.; others show it from 1637 to 1628 B.C.E. The difference may be due to the difficulty in calibrating dates half a globe apart.

  9 Chaos theory holds that incredibly minor changes in “initial conditions” can have an enormous impact on the long-run future. The butterfly effect is a hypothetical example in which a butterfly, flapping its wings in China, could alter the weather, weeks later, in North America. Bradbury's story, which also involved a butterfly, suggested that over the course of time, the death of even a single insect could have enormous impacts.

  10 R. Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 BC. (1993), as quoted in Nur, infra. As the title indicates, Drews himself believed that improved military techniques were the primary reason why this occurred.

  11 The visit is described in his book, Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, 2008, cowritten with Dawn Burgess.

  12 See Richard A. Lovett, “The Great Sumatran Earthquakes of 2004-5,” Analog, October 2006

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: QUICKFEATHERS

  by Alexis Glynn Latner

  * * * *

  Illustrated by Wolf Read

  * * * *

  We learn from our predecessors—but it's harder when we can't converse with them.

  * * * *

  Planet Green is a geological puzzle wrapped in an ecological enigma inside a planetological mystery. The geological puzzle is this: A planet that's had vegetation for billions of years should be oozing with petroleum. But we can't find it. Not in the places Earth-trained geologists know to look. The landscape west of Unity Base gets a lot of their attention anyway, because the geologists are convinced that the underlying rock formations will yield oil, if we can just figure out the rules of the geological game here.

  I'm not convinced that we need to play this game. Green has other sources of energy—sun, wind, and above all, tides. Yes, oil is wonderful stuff that yields fuel and petrochemicals, plastics and medicines, but none of that will solve the crisis facing us now. Our compulsion to seek oil strikes me as a superstitious reflex; it's like resorting to black magic. It's because in all of our hearts, there's a cold core of fear that there may not be a human future on Planet Green.

  My role in resource exploration is aerial survey. I fly a motorglider equipped with scanning and mapping instruments. The motorglider's engines run on biofuel produced from plant matter, but most of the time—more and more, as I learn my way around the sky—the motor stays off. I take advantage of atmospheric thermals, which are abundant in the long days here, and I work ridge lift when there's wind. So I usually don't need the engines to keep us aloft. By “us,” I mean myself and my observer. It's dangerous to be out alone on Planet Green. The danger has less to do with the environment than with what's between our ears—how we react to an environment we didn't evolve in—but that doesn't make the danger any less real. The buddy system is Standard Operating Procedure for everyone in the field.

  Given the cross-training we've all had, my aerial observer could be anybody from a mechanic to a medical technician to a stray scientist. My favorite observer happens to be a theoretical molecular biologist. His name is Joe Toronto. After the long starflight from Earth, depending on how optimistic you felt about this new world—or how much trouble you were in on the old world—some of us changed our last name to honor our city of origin. Joe came from Toronto. I grew up on a farm near Brightwood, Tennessee. I chose to keep my family name, and I'm still Rebecca Fisher, but I named the motorglider Tennessee Kite.

  Joe works long hours in Unity Base, and it's hard, risky work. He's repairing the human genome, damaged by our starflight taking hundreds of years too long. Every so often he likes to get away and ride with me in Kite. He is the most imaginative scientist I've ever met, which makes a surprising difference: He's better than anyone else at seeing what none of us expect here.

  * * * *

  The long days of Planet Green give thermals plenty of time to develop. And overdevelop. One day Joe and I found the sky getting crowded with clouds that had roiling gray roots and icy crowns. I diverted to one of my emergency runways, a stretch of rough limestone ridgetop marked by an orange emergency supply barrel anchoring a windsock. With a rainstorm bearing down on us, we jumped out of the motorglider, tied down the wings and tail, and ran for more substantial cover. Where the ragged ridge abutted a slightly higher hill there was enough of an undercut to provide a shelter from the storm.

  We ducked into the undercut with a cursory look around for hazards like loose rocks that could turn an ankle. We knew we wouldn't meet anything alive that was particularly dangerous. Animal life on Green tends to be small, slow, and soft. No dinosaurs, no birds, no herds of herbivores with carnivores stalking them. The most conspicuous life form on the ridge was a frilly blue lichen with chartreuse fruiting bodies. Planet Green is big on lichens.

  At the back of the undercut I noticed a narrow gap with deep shadow behind it: a cave. I turned on my pocket flashlight to investigate the cave. At first I found nothing but stone, sand, and silence. Then I noticed a black substance coating the ceiling. I touched the black stuff with a gloved finger. It wasn't mold. It also wasn't sticky asphalt, but looked enough like some form of carbon to make my interest level spike very high.

  “Back up,” Joe said. The sharp edge on his voice told me he was either excited or alarmed. I backpedaled until I bumped into him. “Look down.” He pointed past my shoulder at the floor of the cave, a fine-grained gray stone with sand drifted over it. The sand almost covered a long, shallow, curved depression. “Look at the whole floor. What do you see?”

  The
depression extended almost the fourteen-foot width of the cave floor, and it had an unmistakable shape. I yelped, “Wings!”

  Rain lashed the ridgetop outside. The cave stayed dry and quiet. We brushed sand off the shape in the stone. Under my fingers there appeared a stony tracery of feathers at the edge of a wing. I was astounded.

  Planet Green seems primitive, quasi-Devonian, yet life on Green is older than Earth itself. That's the ecological enigma. After peaking in complexity eons ago, the ecosystem on Green devolved from more apparent complexity to less. Lichens and ferns are ubiquitous, while we haven't found anything flowerlike. What Joe and I had discovered in the cave was far more momentous than flowers. We were looking at the fossil of an extinct Green bird. It had lain in fine-grained, water-saturated sediments, undisturbed, as its flesh dissolved and its form turned into slaty stone.

  I've seen pictures of the Archaeopteryx fossils on Earth. Even the most intact of them looked like a run-over, smashed chicken. The creature on the cave floor was very different. With its wings outstretched in a lifelike way, crested head turned to one side, tail fanned out, it looked at peace. Entranced, I was only half aware of Joe prowling around the rim of the cave until I heard him take in a sharp surprised breath. He said, “Remember cuneiform—the first writing—marks pressed into clay with a stick to count sheep and vases of olive oil?”

  Joe's flights of mind could leave me way behind. “What about it?” I looked up. My eyes had adjusted to the dim light, and I saw markings on the cave wall. Rows of marks spiraled from the ceiling of the cave to the bottom of the wall, where the marks were obscured by drifted sand.

  Joe stood there smiling at the marks. “Anybody who can count can think.”

  As what he meant sank in, it made the hair on the nape of my neck rise. “The black stuff on the ceiling,” I said. “It's soot from ancient fires.”

  * * * *

  There's one possibly sentient species on Green that we know of, and they don't even live on land. The species in question is something like a cross between seals and sea cucumbers with some salmon thrown in. We call them Green seals. Every springtime they migrate out of the sea and swim upriver to reproduce by giving birth to live young, who then spend an undetermined amount of time living on land as what we call zucchini slugs. Joe is convinced that the Green seals devolved from beings much like us. “They discovered fire, worshiped a bird god and wrote in the cave, and later returned to the sea,” he says. Everybody else thinks the seals are boring, smell bad, and have unattractive offspring. The truth may lie in the Green seals’ DNA, but it's not Earth DNA, and it'll be a long time until Joe can read it.

  Green is a geological puzzle wrapped in an ecological enigma inside a planetological mystery.

  The planetological mystery is Planet Blue: a moon as big as Green, but covered with oceans and rotating so rapidly that hurricanes ceaselessly spin across its face. A large moon is a very good thing for an earthlike planet to have. It stabilizes the planet's axis of rotation, providing seasonal change within a climate that doesn't vary wildly. It generates tides, making the interface between land and sea procreative. Earth's own moon had a lot to do with Earth's evolutionary success. Planet Blue, though, doesn't make scientific sense. No ecosystem as old as Green's should have a moon as close as Blue. Over billions of years, the two worlds would spiral away from each other, spin down, and end up phase-locked with each other, having the same period of rotation. Planet Green's leisurely day is fifty-two hours long. Fast-spinning Planet Blue's day is eight hours. That can't be, not unless there's been major interference with nature.

  In the early days of the colony, we sent an unmanned exploration drone down through the hurricanes to sample one of the islands on Planet Blue. The drone came back with a chip of rock that turned out to be an artificial material. The island chains in the worldwide sea of Blue are artificial stuff. For reasons unknown, somebody long ago changed Planet Blue on purpose. It was remodeled on a mind-boggling scale, nudged back in from maybe ten times as far away as it is now, and spun up.

  Blue's artificial islands show two hundred million years of weathering. Tens of millions of years is a long, long time for sentient beings. That long ago on Earth, there weren't even any mammals yet. Whoever the movers of Blue were, they're nowhere in evidence and are probably extinct. Could they have been the ones who wrote in the cave? That seems like the most unlikely hypothesis of all—that beings capable of moving a world would worship birds.

  With all of us busy founding a colony, trying to understand ancient cave-writing rates as a sideshow, a hobby to be pursued in spare time, of which we have very little. Our brand new civilization will soon need to tap into Green's natural resources. Metals, diamonds and corundum, uranium, and, if you insist, petroleum. We won't repeat the chain of events that sent Earth's ecosystems to hell in a hand basket. Resource extraction on Planet Green will proceed delicately and deliberately. The first step is simply to map what's here and understand why various resources are where they are—to learn the rules of the geological game.

  Everybody out in the field, though, keeps an eye open for the fine-grained, alluvial sedimentary rocks that can present bird fossils. Now that we know to look, we're finding lots of them. Most resemble the first one, fossilized bone, beak, and all, with wings fanned out. We've also found rock shelters, grottoes, and additional caves with writing on the walls. Some of the sites have been exposed to the elements for millions of years, and everything is weathered down to wisps. But a few of the caves seem to have been sealed off until relatively recent, minor seismic activity cracked them open. In those sites everything is well preserved, even the pictures scratched into soft stone or painted in colored pigments on the walls. Pictures of birds galore, trees, and quadrupeds and snakelike things—the kinds of creatures you'd expect to see on a world with plants, but we've never found here. But no pictures of anything with hands and tools.

  Maybe this cave-writing race had a taboo about depicting itself?

  Some of the writing did turn out to be tallies of numbers. But most of it was far more complex than enumeration. Even with the help of the starship's artificial intelligence, the meaning of the writing proved elusive. Meanwhile the tally of worshipfully fossilized bird fossils increased. There were three different species. The first kind had long, tapering wings with a span averaging twelve feet. There was an even bigger species with long, blunt wings. A third kind of bird was much smaller, with relatively short wings.

  Occam's Razor says you shouldn't multiply bird gods without a good reason.

  One day I was thermalling in Kite, turning ascending circles on a bubble of warm air, not far from Story Bird Cave and over the same ridgy limestone landscape. The engine was off. Kite was functioning as a pure sailplane, and I imagined my own shoulders extending into the long white wings. I could feel the wingtips dip and lift, reading the textures of the air. Sailplane wings look deceptively plain—just long curves and smooth skin with faint stripes—but are as sophisticated as anything ever made by human hands. The ghostly stripes in Kite's wings are Sinha-Blazek deturbulator strips.

  I only wished there'd been an Earth hawk, or even just a turkey vulture, sharing the thermal with me that day. On Earth, the only thing better than flying and feeling the wings of a sailplane as an extension of myself was doing so in the company of a hawk. It was something about Green that always made me a little sad—that the sky is devoid of feathers, flight and song. So I imagined thermalling with a Green bird. Happily climbing the sky with my imaginary bird friend, I remembered the marks in the cave, and the realization hit me like a bolt in the blue: Though the marks could have been made by pointed sticks, talons could do it too. Then I knew the key to translating the cave writing. It was simple.

  Assume the cave writers are birds.

  With that breakthrough, the ship's intelligence began to be able to translate the writing that spiraled down from the apex of Story Bird Cave. This is how it started:

  The People were beset by drago
ns, but the People were brave and swift of wing, and the dragons didn't eat too many People.

  * * * *

  Dragons is a highly questionable translation. The ship's intelligence is working on more urgent problems, and for an artificial intelligence, it may be distracted. Or it may be eccentric in its old age. The journey here took a thousand years of relativistic time, with astronauts and colonists stored in cold stasis while the intelligence guided the ship. There's no other computer that old, except maybe on Earth, which is impossibly distant in space and time. Furthermore, Earth was wracked by war and eco-disaster when we left. I wouldn't bet on much remaining of civilization there, much less a computer of the same vintage as the ship's intelligence.

  Elderly and eccentric as it is, the intelligence decided that it was dealing with a mythological history involving unearthly beings. When it translated Story Bird Cave, it upped and used supernatural terminology.

  Between the deep sea and the high Hinge of the All, the world was long and rich. In warm marshes that teemed with fish-fingerlings, young People practiced how to be hunters of fish in the open sea. Dangerous monsters infested the sea, but the People were strong and maneuverable, and the brave-winged hunters always found fish to bring home. Except for the marauding dragons, the People were happy.

  Then one day a great blue pearl appeared in the sky. It deranged the sea.

  That bit stopped the translation in its tracks. Finally, Joe—at work in the lab in Unity Base, with our doctor, Catharin, who's his wife and my best friend—suddenly laughed. “The pearl in the sky was Planet Blue.”

  Catharin isn't fazed by Joe's fugues of imagination. She countered, “Why call it a pearl?”

  “Their universe was a bivalve. Sea in the bottom half, sky in the top half. The Hinge of the All was a high mountain range beside a long, narrow coastline. And their homeland—the coast between the mountains and the sea—was the meat in the cosmic shell.”